It comes of having lost our ancient ways - the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society. It has a peculiar shape with the Irish, though. To Ned Brown For his years of friendship PRECEDE There's a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting after the Ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. The guy didn't like women much.Īnyway, if you take anything from this review, is that together with Hellstrom's Hive and of course the Dune series, this is one of the books that impacted me most.The White Plague Frank Herbert Publisher: Gollancz (February 24, 1983) ISBN-10: 0575032405 ISBN-13: 978-0575032408 That in a story which covers the death of most women on Earth.
There is just one, really, in this book, and she comes across as stupid, vain but also calculatingly self serving, while still having men fawning over her. The ideas that the author is analyzing are interesting, but the pacing is slow, methodical, and perhaps the reason why more people haven't heard of this book.Īnd there is the usual strangeness of Herbert's approach to female characters. And to tell you the truth, the scientist is not very sympathetic, the IRA soldier is annoying and the priest and the child are unbearable. The theme reminds me of his short story Public Hearing, which explores what happens when immense destructive power can be achieved with little effort by individuals, and how that makes governments - the keepers of peace - obsolete.īut then there is the larger part of the book that is just the guy walking in the Irish countryside with a priest, a mute child and an IRA member that was actually the one who ordered the bomb that killed his wife. I can't but smile at the implications, that if a smart educated scientist gets pissed off they could easily cause more damage than the toys and sticks of military people. He goes mad and creates a plague to destroy the people who wronged him by killing their women.
I mean, it's Herbert!Ī violent "Provo" bombing kills the wife and daughters of a molecular biologist that was in Ireland on vacation. The rest is psychological explorations of people motivations and characters, the ubiquitous Herbert attempts to find a solution to the toxic human organizational structures, analysis of history, violence, religion and philosophy. A bit anachronistic, with some pacing issues, The White Plague is still one of Frank Herbert's best.Īfter reading the book synopsis, one expects to get a book about a violent global pandemic, but in fact that's just the first quarter of the book. Imagine reading a novel about a global pandemic with the background of Irish violence right about when Covid struck and people didn't know how Brexit was going to turn out and what it would do to Irish tensions.
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